When the Patient Designs Infographics

by Dr. Bertalan Meskó on March 22, 2012

Katie McCurdy is an information-specialist so it wasn’t that surprising when she decided to design infographics showing and describing her medical history with plenty of details about her chronic condition (myasthenia gravis).

So for this week’s office visit, I have prepared a visual timeline, an infographic, if you will, that I will print and take with me to my visit. This timeline charts the progress of my Myasthenia Gravis since I was 13 – not only the hard facts like the medications I was taking at the time, but the way I *felt* during those times and the degree of weakness I was experiencing. Overlaid is the progression of my stomach problems over my lifetime, including the points in time when I took antibiotics. Laying these waveform-like patterns on top of one another reveals that often my MG and my stomach problems were involved in a dance of sorts, taking steep dives simultaneously.

Hi Berci, This seems useful. The problem is, most patients aren’t information specialists and might spend a lot of time preparing images that are far less informative. Still, I think it’s a great example of what can be done.

My patients do not generally bring in such beautiful graphs. However, I do really emphasize the value of logs in symptom management. When I deal with pediatric sleep issues, I often find that the problems start to improve when the family starts to log these symptoms. I also see a lot of asthmatics at one of my clinic who have engineers for parents. They log peak flow info . This data can be very useful. I think it is incumbent on physician to provide easy to use tools for families to track symptoms of note.